We just had preliminary discussions with Aruba about this. Although it's true that we have very little or no need to support 11n through our infrastructure, the existence of rogues is a substantial concern. Since 11n uses different frequencies than 11[abg] it can't be detected directly by an 11[abg] sensor. You are left with four choices, as far as I can tell: 1) ignore 11n and maybe it will not be a problem until you can fund and roll out 11n yourself 2) try to detect 11n indirectly (making the assumption that 11n devices are 11[abg] compatible as well, and that they can be blocked by appealing to their 11[abg] side 3) deploy 11[abgn] monitors on your system, and use them to triangulate and locate the rogues. 4) deploy 11n wholesale.
Options 3 and 4 are not even possibilities at this point, AFAIK, because the monitors/WAPs won't become available until about 3Q2007 . Option 4 is very expensive, not just for the cost of the waps, but because the 11n WAPs will exceed the POE available power by a significant margin, so alternate power must be provided. In addition, since the capacity of 11n is likely to exceed 100Mb/s by a wide margin, this means we must add 1G connections to the WAPs, and in turn, we will most likely need to upgrade from 1G to 10G between buildings. Our general approach is to start out with option 2 and move to 3 as it appears feasible about a year from now. option 4 would require a significant infrastructure replacement, which isn't in the cards for several years, minimum, on our campus. John Rodkey Associate director of I.T. Westmont Simon Kissler wrote: > Lee, > > I don't know if it's an issue of not thinking about it. I for one keep > my eye on it, but until a standard is ratified and we get some gear > with that standard on campus to do some real assessment in our > environment, I keep on coming back to the point that it's largely > academic at the moment. We won't deploy or use any pre-n gear as it > too often happens that things change in the late hours of anything new > and making any investment just to throw it out seems a pretty big > waste (or even worse contending with gear that "sort of" works, if > wiggled and massaged the right way). So in short, we're thinking about > it and keeping an eye on the ratification process as well as our > preferred vendor's reactions, roadmaps, and predictions, but that is > about as far as we'll go with it. That said we have the luxury that > some of our infrastructure that likely would not be able to support it > is being looked at separately under different cover and will hopefully > be addressed by the time this becomes a topic to really wrestle with. > > Cheers, > > -Simon > > Lee Badman wrote: >> Looking forward, wondering how (and if) members of this group are >> contemplating the impact of 802.11n on your WLANs? I would wager many of >> us have rogue pre-standard 802.11n hardware on campus now. Also, I have >> heard some vendors poo-poo .11n as a non-starter for the enterprise, and >> others promising support as soon as it is a ratified standard. Then >> there's worries if even a fast ethernet cable is robust enough for the >> promised throughputs of 802.11n... a lot to the discussion, obviously, >> and since it's still in draft it's easy to not think about. But those >> who are pondering, I'd be curious to hear thoughts and opinions. >> >> Regards- >> >> Lee Badman >> >> ********** >> Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE >> Constituent Group discussion list can be found at >> http://www.educause.edu/groups/. >> > > ********** > Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE > Constituent Group discussion list can be found at > http://www.educause.edu/groups/. ********** Participation and subscription information for this EDUCAUSE Constituent Group discussion list can be found at http://www.educause.edu/groups/.
